Mount & Blade Collection

The announcement of Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord last September was curiously light on details but while we expected developer Taleworlds to dribble more out slowly, it instead went stone silent. On Friday, exactly one year later, it finally broke this to release a dozen screenshots. The game's still something of a mystery, though.

For a series about building an army of warriors and rampaging across battlefields on foot with axes swinging, the announcement of Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord is awfully quiet. Developer TaleWorlds Entertainment quietly confirmed yesterday that yes, it's making the sequel to Mount & Blade: Warband, but didn't really have much else to say and the teaser trailer revealed little.

All TaleWorlds has to say about the game is contained in the following paragraph:

This sandbox action-RPG strategy hybrid will take players on a journey into a fictional world of up-close and personal medieval combat on a huge scale, bigger, bloodier and more intense than ever before. Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord will build upon the popular Mount & Blade franchise bringing in many exciting and highly requested new features.

Which is all very vague. Platforms, a release date, and all that are a mystery for now.

The Mount & Blade gang at Taleworlds are elevating another mod, this time turning fan-made mod Mount & Musket: Battalion into the paid expansion 'Napoleonic Wars' for M&B Warband. The multiplayer-only DLC drags the warfare sim into the real world during Napoleon's conquest of Europe, with over 220 unique units including engineers, artillery and musicians.

"We re-made it completely from scratch: bigger, better and more," developer Flying Squirrel Entertainment explained in a forum post. As well as shiny new graphics, Napoleonic Wars boasts bags of extra features over the original mod, and has been given a rebalancing.

Arriving this spring, Napoleonic Wars offers five nations from the early 19th century. Warfare's a bit jazzed up since Warband's medieval setting, with guns, artillery including cannons and rockets, and engineers able to construct barricades and plant explosives to destroy enemy structures. There's also a new 'Commander Battles' mode, putting you in charge of squads of bots.